Monday, January 14, 2013

De Magia Veterum: The Deification (2012)

Sonic Chaos

Most of us have at least one person in our lives who has to tolerate our music. Most of it ain’t pretty, after all. For me, it’s my wife. She can for the most part ignore it (or at least appear to ignore it), while I entertain the kids and my toddlers dance to the music.

But there are some exceptions. There is a kind of music that even metalheads can only describe as “fucked up”: Your Portals and Mitochondrions, and to a lesser extent your Ulcerates and Deathspell Omegas. This is the stuff that sounds so abrasive and runs so counter to the typical rules of music that even among our odd contingent, you must say it’s an acquired taste. De Magia Veterum is most certainly that kind of band, judging by my wife’s reaction to hearing it.

De Magia Veterum is a one-man project of the same Dutchman who operates under the moniker Gnaw Their Tongues. It’s a more black metal-oriented extension of his mission to create the most horrifying, unpalatable music imaginable.

The Deification sounds like the most twisted parts of Shining (Nor). It sounds like the gremlins from the film of the same name got a week in the studio, with Jackson Pollock as producer. It sounds like a hive of giant, mechanical bees constructed by Skynet. In other words, it sounds pretty awesome, at least at first. As a fan of a lot of this kind of music, I knew it was going to take a lot of listening to get the full benefit out of what this band has to offer. Yet the more I listened to it, the more I still didn’t understand it. I couldn’t find that inexplicable groove of Portal, that compelling atmosphere and percussive brutality of Ulcerate. All I could find is chaos after chaos. Screeching riffs, buzzing, pounding percussion and straight-up noise are strung together in a manner that can only be described as random.

As a collection of sonic experiments or a palette to begin writing music, The Deification is intriguing. As a finished work, it’s still nothing more than intriguing.

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